As my spirit toured the facility, I recognized physicists and engineers whom I had known from my adolescent years at the academy. As members of the twelve tribes who suffered as a subservient class under the Council’s autocratic rule, these scientists and their skilled laborers had been working together in secrecy to design and construct a fleet of saucer-shaped starships. Unlike the conventional transports now in orbit over Charon, these vessels were powered by an electrogravitic propulsion system, a generator that produced an anti-gravity vortex that would theoretically make interdimensional travel possible. The technology had threatened the Council’s carbon-based hold on the economy and had therefore been banned, and now the planet’s twelve tribes—Charon’s lowest rung society—were on the brink of using it to flee our star system in search of a habitable world suitable for colonization.

It would have made for a delicious irony had the propulsion system actually worked.

With a sudden wave of pain, I found myself back in my cell, once more imprisoned in a dying body.

Pain is part of the physical condition; suffering is a choice we make. Having been given a task, I decided that I would no longer suffer my fate. I would use it as a means to save my people.

First, I needed to be free.

Even lacking guards, escape was out of the question. The cell door was bolted from the outside, the open ceiling slats too high to reach. Physically, I barely possessed the strength to stand. Even if I could replicate my out-of-body experience, it offered no means of communicating my dilemma to others. And while I still maintained the ability to communicate with my past lives, there was nothing they could do to release me unless …

I had been raised and educated on the scientific, philosophical, and spiritual belief that life is interconnected through a single consciousness that pervades all existence. This universal mind is present everywhere at the same time. One must simply know it, believe in it, and apply it through meditative practice, and miracles can happen.

The miracle I would seed was a visual message, a map that began in the rebel camp and led to my prison. At the culmination of this dream, the dreamer would witness a functioning electrogravitic propulsion system whirling away in my cell.

My targeted viewers would be the scientists working on a means to escape Charon, half a continent away.

Solitude and starvation made for intense meditation sessions that bordered on delirium.

For weeks, I teetered on the brink of death until one late afternoon when my cell door was wrenched open on its rusted hinges.

The rebel leader was tall and lanky, his youth and dark complexion revealing his lineage to be one of the eastern tribes. Three other males accompanied him, one of whom performed a quick physical examination on me before feeding me intravenously.